


Blank

by kuonji



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, Horror, NaNoWriMo, Writer's Block
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-22
Updated: 2018-11-22
Packaged: 2019-08-27 16:27:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16705894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kuonji/pseuds/kuonji
Summary: A NaNoWriMo horror story.





	Blank

The screen was blank. Her mind was blank. She stared at the blinking cursor in desperate resignation.

Tea. She needed tea.

She picked up the mug beside her laptop and took a sip of cold Earl Grey. When she started to put it down, she frowned. Something was... different about her mug. She was sure of it. There was the cartoon as usual, the sketched abstractness of two anthropomorphized animals talking to each other.

Yes, that was it. The caption was gone. Strange.

She rubbed her thumb over the space where the caption had used to be.

A kind of flicker at the corner of her eye caught her attention. A felt tip pen with a fine point lay at the edge of her desk. She was sure it hadn't been there before. She picked it up uncertainly.

She was supposed to write the caption back in. She didn't know how she knew that. Anyway, sleep-deprived and frazzled, she couldn't at the moment remember what it had used to say.

"I'm not making any sense." She laughed at herself and set both mug and pen back down. She obviously needed a break.

Standing and stretching, she rolled her neck around, and then she headed out toward the kitchen for a glass of water.

"Hi, Mommy!" Her five-year-old daughter sat at the table, swinging her legs, crayons scattered around her. She was scribbling bright colors on a giant sketch pad.

"Hi, Honey."

Her daughter frowned up at her. She tilted her head and asked, "Writer's block?"

She laughed. "Yeah. It's okay. Mommy will get past it. I always do."

"Okay. Color?"

She took the blue crayon her daughter proffered and sat down next to her. Maybe an activity with a lack of words would be good for her right now. She set the crayon to the paper, but something made her look more closely at her daughter.

"Is that your hippo shirt?"

"Uh-huh."

Her daughter was wearing a light blue shirt with a laughing purple hippo on it. There had used to be a clever saying across the top in white bubble letters, she thought. "Did it always look like that?"

Her daughter gave her a blank look.

"Never mind." When she started to draw again, she realized that she wasn't holding the crayon anymore. A white fabric marker was in her hand. She dropped it with a clatter. "Sorry, Honey, I can't color right now. Later, okay?"

"Okay."

She scrubbed her face and stood up.

In the living room, her husband was watching the news. She grabbed the doorframe in confused horror as she stared at the TV. The newscaster was talking in a consoling tone while, behind him, footage of a concerned-looking woman played. The chyron was a blank rectangle. The stock ticker was a thick black line. Even the logo in the corner with the channel name was blank.

Her laptop appeared on the counter next to her, causing her to utter a muted shriek.

"Oh! I didn't see you there," her husband said, turning at the sound.

Not answering him, she ran to the front door and fled outside.

She hadn't had any idea of a place to go, but she saw a gray and white lump on the driveway and nearly cried for joy.

The newspaper. Of course. That bastion of words.

She ran over and picked it up -- and gasped.

It was blank. Every page was blank. There were a few pictures, but the articles were gone. The captions were gone. The page numbers were gone, too, so that she held only an unordered pile of newsprint printed sparsely with a few pictures, some borders, ads, and, on the last page, a four-panel comic with no dialogue whatsoever and nothing where the title used to be.

Clutching the paper to her, she looked up and down the street.

The street sign at the end was blank. The cheerful banner on her neighbor's lawn, celebrating Thanksgiving, was blank. The house numbers were all gone, including her own.

A piece of chalk appeared in her hand. She stared at it, then walked with determination to the side of her house. She set the chalk to the wall--

\--and realized that she couldn't remember her address.

She dropped the chalk. It fell to the pavement. She couldn't remember the word for the sound that it made as it landed and broke in half.

Making an indistinct noise, she ran back into the house, back through the living room, back through the kitchen.

"Mommy?"

She pasted on a smile and turned to reassure her daughter -- and screamed.

Her daughter's face was blank. It was nothing but a stretch of skin vaguely molded into a generic face.

A pile of charcoal pencils appeared in her hand, an eraser in the other.

"I'm not even an artist!" she yelled. She shook her hands frantically, but the pencils stayed glued to her hand, insisting to be used.

"Mommy, what's wrong?" her faceless daughter asked.

"What's going on?" Her husband rushed into the kitchen. "What's the matter?" Despite his worried tone, his face showed nothing but a skin-colored blank slate.

"No words! No art! I can't do it. _Stop!_ " she screamed.

She woke up in bed.

A dream.

She took a deep breath and closed her eyes, living for a moment in the horror she had been convinced she was living just a moment ago.

"That was intense," she said out loud. "I should write this down." She fumbled for the notebook she kept next to her bed. Her pen was out of ink. She frowned, shook it, drew fierce circles in the bottom corner of the page until it left heavy dents. Giving up, she went to her desk and fired up her laptop instead.

By the time she sat down, however, the dream had slipped away. It had been such an interesting nightmare. She would have liked to have recorded it for her dream journal. It might have been a good story, even.

But the screen was blank. Her mind was blank.

Perhaps some tea would help...

  
END.


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